22 Jun What You Need To Know About WhyCry Ransomware

With several different ransomware attacks making the news over the last few months, the need for improved IT security is at an all time high.  This past week, yet another major variant of this ransomware has caused problems.  Here is what you need to know:

What is Ransomware?

The idea behind ransomware is actually quite simple.  Cyber criminals create small, easy to hide programs that can be discretely placed on your computer if you do something as simple as clicking a link in an e-mail or downloading a program from an unsafe site.  Once on your PC, these programs encrypt, or lock up, your files and place a complicated password on them.  Once this has happened, your files become impossible to open until you pay the cyber criminals for the password that is needed to unlock them.  Most ransomware threatens to delete all of your files if you are not willing to pay the requested price.

Shouldn’t My Anti-Virus Protect Me From This Type of Thing?

While a good Anti-Virus is an important part of IT Security and will often catch threats like this, they should not be relied on as the only or primary line of defense.  In a situation such as this, once the ransomware has been downloaded, it may be too late for an Anti-Virus to completely protect the PC.

So How Can You Protect Your PC’s?

The good news is that this ransomware can be easily protected against if you have taken the proper security precautions.  At SOS Support, we encourage all of our clients to use a Dell SonicWALL firewall, which is one of the very best lines of defense against threats like this one.  Within hours of the first reports of the WhyCry ransomware, the SonicWALL teams at Dell identified the threat and insured that the ransomware would not be getting through any of the SonicWALL firewalls.

If you have any questions about ransomware, SonicWALL’s, or how you can better protect your network, don’t hesitate to contact the IT Security experts at SOS Support!